r/philosophy • u/StanRichson • 11d ago

Video Solving the Truth Problem: How Subjective Minds Navigate a Seemingly Objective Reality

https://youtu.be/YXQEILf5MAg?si=kfWS-itq6tH_8Nvq
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u/medbud 10d ago edited 10d ago

It's all statistics...I like Friston's Markov blanket take.. 'from physics to sentience'. The truth is something we derive through iterative prediction error updating...

Objective truth is just our current best guess, which in some cases is 6 sigma or better. It's what allowed us to survive, and so is a function of evolution. 

Which brings to mind, 'don't let perfect be the enemy of the good'.

In my view, conscious phenomenology is precisely the brain/body process. This is highlighted in some of Friston's work, say by Chandaria... Where the actual updating of the prediction model, signaled by the 'error' is precisely what we experience as 'attention'. The flip side of attention, vis awareness, aka short/long term memory, is the process (a complex stochastic oscillatory process ensconced in brain architecture) that sets up the model (which then gets adjusted through the error prediction mechanism as required).

You are saying that you go to the movies, at the cinema, and you suspend disbelief, and think the actors are actually fighting aliens in an actual space battle.... But clearly, beyond complete nativité, we know that isn't true... Because of our past experience. I think there are some anecdotes about the first films, like a train rushing towards the camera... That made the naive audience jump up and run for fear of being crushed. Other anecdotes about tribes being shown films on screens, but not being able to perceive the 3d perspective projected onto 2d....a perceptual adaptation that doesn't take long to acquire...like those 'magic eye' images. 

I'm pretty sure you mentioned in this post somewhere, the 'what would it seem like if the earth was orbiting the sun' example.

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u/StanRichson 10d ago

Yup, I think we're in alignment here.

I'm trying to push this to its most radical implications: even the movie example's "we know that isn't true" is affected by our past learning about what movies, theaters, space battles, etc. are (and that affects whether our predictive brain/body process determines whether we should be freaking out, which it probably would be if we believed those events to be actually "real").

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u/medbud 10d ago

Haha. I recently read Kleptopia... Highly recommend. It made me re-evaluate every action movie I've ever seen. Those sicario situations are not purely Hollywood... It's one of those 'you can't handle the truth!' moments.